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By Root 569 0

refined, don’t you know!’ Samos the judge had later heard the Minister say, ‘We have to plough with the oxen we have.’ The stink came and went. As for the hunting squad, he and one or two others, Father Munio when he came of course, would try to hold it in or, if they had to, do it a little apart, at a discreet distance, not so far apart as to attract attention, but without joining the common flood. Lofty thoughts don’t come when you want them to. What gave the regime real meaning was not bravado, but the idea of divine leadership. ‘Forget about the vulgar nature of the rabble and think about history,’ Dez had said to him one day. He was the most refined in their circle, spoke with nostalgia of Primo de Rivera’s poetic court and shared his sentiment, ‘What we need is culture.’ Their leader was an envoy of Providence. They had to maintain the link: follow our leader, follow Providence, keep the enemy at bay. That was the important thing. What was written on the face of coins being used by every single citizen: ‘Caudillo by the grace of God’. What was on the reverse, not written, but in everyone’s mind, like a tonsure clipped with scissors of fear, could well be the title adopted by the Assyrian king Tiglath: ‘He who subdued his enemies’. A historical reference he resorted to with delight. In his lectures and seminars, and above all in his involvement with Arbor in Compostela and Coimbra, were those two special moments when he released his Christian Epimetheus, opened Pandora’s box or descended with Heidegger to Plato’s cave in order to arouse the soft, comfortable descendants of the Victory elites. He knew how to wake them. Nothing better than a bolt of lightning from his revered master Schmitt: ‘And Cain killed Abel. This is how the history of mankind begins . . .’

At that point, he’d got their attention. The judge would then turn to another hammer-blow from another of his most distinguished colleagues, the future Minister: ‘Without war, there would be no history.’ He’d then take a good look at the Old Testament, where God is known as the Lord of Hosts. ‘The Lord is on my side. Whom shall I fear? The day of the Lord is great and terrible.’

Natura Est Maxima in Minimis

He’s going to examine a sample of his blood. Having coughed. His blood on the slide. The new world he’s going to discover today was inside his chest. If a drop of water is the first sphere, that drop of blood is a final sphere, since in it are life and death, the two of them working for each other. It’s one of the extraordinary moments in 12 Panadeiras Street. He recalls the eye’s expectation as it approaches the microscope, blinks, sings Natura est maxima in minimis, drawn by the universal exhibition contained in a drop of blood, his own blood. They’ve plundered his cabinet of curiosities, his amateur scientist instruments, appliances for finally seeing what’s invisible, this and the other side contained in a drop of blood. In every drop of blood. Speaking of spheres, they’ve plundered that as well, his wooden globe made in England. The first thing he noticed on that globe, like strange, unnamed territories, were the roses of the winds and the drawings of unusual sea creatures. The one he liked most, and continued to like as time went by, was a half sea-serpent, half-man, playing the lute by the Seychelles. After that, he ventured into the large patches of colour. On the seas and oceans, the globe was marked with sailing ships tracing historical routes. The first his father’s finger pointed out to him was the Beagle, next to the Galapagos. Darwin’s ship. A stubborn finger. It always went back there. The Beagle, the Darwin finger. Later, when it was his own finger doing the pointing and his daughter reading, the thing that captivated her most, the great discovery, were the names of places. These words were the globe’s greatest charm. The Pacific, for example, was populated with words. The dots showing the islands were barely visible, but what really came across were the names. Nanumea. Nanumano. Nanumanga. Nukononu. Pukapuka. In November 1937, in his